New York Launches 'Tech Matchmaker' Website

Nicole is a social media journalist for the CDW family of technology magazines.

New York City is making it easier for startups and investors to find each other and for tech companies to connect with qualified job seekers through a new online platform: Digital.NYC.

Mayor Bill de Blasio unveiled the digital hub earlier this month, calling it the “ultimate tech matchmaker” that will further drive rapid growth of the city’s tech community. The site includes job listings, news about the tech economy, an interactive events calendar and, as of publication time on Monday, a database of 5,719 startups, 160 investors and 2,453 jobs.

“I was gratified to see that this is not a site that uses mystical and complex language,” de Blasio said during the launch event. “There are straightforward phrases like 'get funding,' something we can all appreciate. Or, here’s my personal favorite: 'find a job.' To everyone who was part of creating Digital.NYC, I give them extra credit for accessibility and clarity of language.”

The expectation, de Blasio said, is that Digital.NYC will foster these relationships in real-time and “open up tremendous potential for an even faster growth of this community.”

The city’s tech community has seen strong growth over the past decade. Kyle Kimball, president of the New York City Economic Development Corp. (NYEDC), said at the launch event that “tech is vital to diversification of this city’s economy, producing 300,000 jobs, $125 billion of annual output, $50 billion in wages, 45,000 jobs alone in the last 10 years added, and these are high-quality, good paying jobs.”

The Story Behind Digital.NYC

The idea for a centralized website like Digital.NYC is not entirely new, Kimball noted. Former Mayor Michael Bloomberg's administration had similar intentions when it launched the Made in New York website. What makes Digital.NYC different is that “City Hall really challenged us … to create a website that was a lot more inclusive, that had more to do with just not where companies are located, but where the jobs are, how to access those jobs, how to get trained for those jobs, how to get training, how to find capital,” Kimball explained. The website also includes voices from all five boroughs.

IBM, Gust and NYEDC are among the public- and private-sector organizations that joined forces to back the new website, according to The Next Web.

Kimball made clear that the site is not financially driven, which means no financial transactions will take place on the website and companies cannot pay to have their jobs listed more prominently than others.